Chapter 0: Endgame
This campaign is set in the land formerly known as Qadira, twenty years after what many scholars throughout Golarion refer to as 'The Disavowment,' whereby the corpus of Divine Magic was either dramatically altered or lost completely. While most Arcane Magic (with the exception of those arcane spells which mimicked Divine effects) remained unaffected, Clerics across the planet found themselves unable to perform even basic healing services. Even the simplest of poisons and diseases proved to be too much, while wounds which could previously have been mended by a simple Cure Light Wounds spell were left to heal by more mundane means. Even the very recently dead could not be roused from their eternal slumber, and those in the afterlife planes with which many Clerics regularly communed had fallen strangely silent. Even the Gods provided no relief or explanation, refusing to answer even the most heartfelt of requests from their followers. Across the entire planet, battles stopped without warning and armies disengaged to nurse wounds which could no longer be made trivial by the battalions of Clerics they had brought with them. Wars ground to a halt amid mass domestic panic in almost every civilized nation, and the few soldiers who didn't desert were recalled to protect the hearts of their respective kingdoms. Empires whose political power was predicated on infernal or divine favor fell to pieces in mere weeks; others lasted longer, and some persevered despite the hardship — but after only a year, not a single kingdom across all of Golarion looked as it once had. Major trading hubs remained largely intact, taking up their new role as the centerpieces of powerful city-states. As the campaign begins, these are the major regional powerhouses, each with standing armies, financial independence, and stable aristocratic governments. Absalom most closely resembles its former self, and boasts Golarion's last remaining bastion of centralized worship: The Bank of Abadar, which was built by an uneasy faction of variously-aligned Clerics who sought somewhere to store their local treasures in the wake of widespread looting which followed the Disavowment. The Bank features a separate chapel for the worship of every major deity across Golarion, although the worshipers of some of the more sinister Gods and Goddesses are watched closely by the city guard. Five years after the Disavowment, a coalition of Clerics from disparate faiths all across Golarion managed to reclaim some of what was taken from them. Across the planet, rudimentary healing spells could be cast once more, albeit at the expense of considerably more time and effort than was previously required. They called it 'the Spark', hoping that it might be the means by which they could reignite the flames of their shattered powers; but fifteen years later, no progress has been made into the issues of inter-planar travel and communication, divine intervention, or resurrection of the fallen. Most regions have descended into various states of localized warfare, with peasant warlords and disenfranchised knights vying for control over tracts of land barely large enough to sustain their own armies. As the story begins, we see the first post-Disavowment generation coming of age and taking up arms in a world which has never held for them the mercies of a guaranteed afterlife or divine communion.